11. Emacs interface

One easy method of using Festival is via an Emacs interface
that allows selection of text regions to be sent to Festival for
rendering as speech.

‘festival.el’ offers a new minor mode which offers
an extra menu (in emacs-19 and 20) with options for saying a selected
region, or a whole buffer, as well as various general control
functions. To use this you must install ‘festival.el’ in
a directory where Emacs can find it, then add to your
‘.emacs’ in your home directory the following lines.

Successive calls to say-minor-mode will toggle the minor
mode, switching the ‘say’ menu on and off.

Note that the optional voice selection offered by the language sub-menu
is not sensitive to actual voices supported by the your Festival
installation. Hand customization is require in the ‘festival.el’
file. Thus some voices may appear in your menu that your Festival
doesn’t support and some voices may be supported by your Festival
that do not appear in the menu.

When the Emacs Lisp function festival-say-buffer or the
menu equivalent is used the Emacs major mode is passed to Festival
as the text mode.